Oasis Days: Pisco, Desert Wine And An Earthquake 

Carlos in Nasca asked us one of the funniest and most unusual questions we’ve ever been asked on our travels. The conversation went along the lines of…

“So, in England it rains a lot, yes?”

“Well, yes, on lots of days”

“And sometimes it rains at night?”

“Yes”

“And you can hear that it is raining?”

“Well….yes”

“I cannot understand. How would you be able to sleep if you can hear the rain?”

So here speaks a man whose whole life has been spent in the desert, a man who cannot even conceive of a world where you would be able to fall asleep to the sound of rain. Doesn’t travel bring out the most wonderful little exchanges?

Anyway, such was our absorption in the amazing Nasca Lines that we barely mentioned what a pleasant little town Nasca itself is, centred around its elegant small square to which half of the town’s population seem to gravitate each evening. There’s a calm, relaxed feeling about the town, maybe influenced by the never changing year round climate.

There’s a festival in town – of course there is – the Semana Turistica, ostensibly celebrating how the Nasca Lines have brought visitors, and prosperity, to the town. It’s a particularly amusing misnomer in that, firstly, “semana” means “week” and the festival lasts for fourteen days, and, secondly, the whole pageant is based around traditional dances and folk music and has naff all to do with tourists. Ah but it’s colourful, energetic and loud, and there is an endearing joy on the faces of participants and onlookers alike.

Our next link up with the comfortable, punctual and efficient Cruz del Sur bus company brings us to yet another exciting destination, the perfect oasis village of Huacachina, so perfect that it looks like a page out of a picture book or maybe even a Hollywood film set. Surrounded by gigantic sand dunes deep in the Ica Desert, the tiny village curves around three quarters of the palm tree lined water, the other side seeing the colossal dune sweep right down to the water’s edge.

The gigantic dunes are just too tempting….”climb me” they call. So we just dump our stuff and set off up the demanding ascent, rising to 520m at the top – a straight-up elevation gain of 120m in deep soft sand which is pretty tough going. It is much more than simply worth the effort, the views down to the village are seriously awesome but even they are possibly outdone by the reverse views across the top of the incredible dunes, like an Alpine vista made entirely of sand. What wonderful scenery. 

It should be said though that this movie-set picture perfect village is also a definite fixture on the gap year traveller route as young thrill seekers hit the parasailing/sand boarding/sand skiing trail. On our first night this meant extremely loud club music thumping out across the dunes until after four in the morning – we feared the worst, but then oddly both Friday and Saturday nights are full of peace and quiet.

The nearby town of Ica has something you wouldn’t expect in a desert – a thriving wine industry. In the green valley which runs between the huge arid mountains, conditions are perfect for twenty different grape varieties and the surrounding vineyards are extensive. We’ve been drinking Tacama Gran Tinto ever since our first night in Lima, not realising until now that we will get the opportunity to visit that self same winery. It’s actually a beautiful place, and the tour of the premises and, of course, the tasting, is excellent, made even better by the museum-like displays of century old wine making equipment including presses and pumps.

Now, I will have to be careful here, knowing that a very astute former sommelier is a regular reader of our posts, but I concur fully with the preface in an Encyclopaedia of World Wines which I have at home, a preface which says something like “there’s no such thing as good wine, there’s just wine that you like. If you like it, then it’s a good wine”. Or something like that. Anyway, we loved Tacama from the first bottle and it hasn’t disappointed yet.

On from Tacama to two different pisco distilleries for more learning and more tasting. Peru’s favourite drink is these days available in many flavours, though we’ve come to love the pisco sour which the Peruana adore as their chosen aperitif. Incidentally, if and when you get chance to drink pisco sour, do NOT drink it through the straw which they sometimes give you. Drinking through a straw completely misses an essential sensation, that of drinking the alcohol through the fluffy egg white head on the drink. Yep, fluffy egg white, like half way to meringue. Very nice.

Of the pisco flavours, we love the algarrobina. Algarrobina is Spanish for carob, but this creamy pisco is like drinking an alcoholic Werther’s Original, if you know what that is. So after being “out on the pisco” all day we feel obliged to show our stickability and indulge in a couple of Cusqueňa beers and a bottle of Gran Tinto before our bed starts to call. We feel we’ve done complete justice to a dedicated drinking day.

I wake about 5am, sleep having been long and deep. As I lay contemplating what today might bring and Michaela starts to stir, the roof of the building starts to rumble, then rattle. Michaela wakes, startled. By now the bed is vibrating, the rumbles and rattles have spread from the roof to the whole building and the main light fitting is swinging on its chain. There’s a crash outside, then all is still. We look at each other. That had to be an earthquake.

Google quickly confirms it – the monitoring websites have recorded a 6.0 magnitude quake with its epicentre 315km from here. Well, we’ve always wondered how we’ve managed to avoid earthquakes on our previous travels, and also wondered what one would feel like. It feels quite exciting to have experienced one without suffering any damage or injury. Oh, and the crash outside? A section of masonry from the roof edge is no longer in place and now lies in pieces in the garden of the former convent which is our creaking old hotel. 

After breakfast the village is still, all is well. Nobody is talking about earthquakes, such things are evidently too commonplace around here for this one to warrant any attention.

For our last hurrah in the oasis we take a fun and exhilarating ride in one of the many buggies here, being driven at speed over the dunes and down hair raising drops as steep as roller coasters. It’s enormously enjoyable though throughout the spin part of me wishes I was allowed to drive one, they look so cool. We also take a look at the sand boarding slopes, but they are very long and very steep, so with a dodgy hip for one of us and an unreliable knee for the other, we bottle it and decide that ruining the rest of the trip would not be a great outcome for a brief moment of joy.

And so we’re done. We’re leaving the desert behind now, and moving from dry to decidedly wet. Our next call is four nights in the Amazon jungle. Plus ça change, so to speak.